


Eddie Kaspbrak Bisexuality Manifesto

by dorkofyore



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: M/M, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 09:10:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21195203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorkofyore/pseuds/dorkofyore
Summary: Fandom meta of things I think support an interpretation of Eddie as bisexual





	Eddie Kaspbrak Bisexuality Manifesto

I'm not as old as Eddie Kaspbrak but I was growing up in the 90s just a little behind him. I was there Gandalf! I was there 3,000 years ago! And I relate to him so much. I know Richie's bi (or maybe just repressed gay) too but he never had the experiences that made me go "me" like Eddie did. Most of my examples are from the book but some are from the recent movies. Apparently the 1990 movie implied he was gay but I haven't seen it. So sue me. Here are the things about Eddie that I think make a bi interpretation plausible (Plausible! I'm not saying "one hundred percent fact" because there's room for more than one interpretation and I have manners).

  1. Being skinny and faggy and getting picked on for it and just being confused and mad more than upset. In It Chatper 2 when Richie freezes up in the arcade after getting called gay, that's more like the reaction of “I've known I'm not attracted to girls and dreaded it through all of puberty”, and that's something gay guys I know talk about (but obviously I don't speak for the gay experience or every gay guy). Getting made fun of for being gay as a bi guy was more confusing, you hear it and think "hey! But I am attracted to girls!" and you just get indignant in the moment, and the shame and being scared comes later.
  2. Another thing I'm pulling from my own and friends' experiences rather than specific moments in It, but, growing up gay was apparently more of an experience of you knowing and your parents knowing and trying to stop it in action before it could take hold. My growing up experience was those newsweek articles about bisexuality (remember the gee laurie i thought it was cancer one) that, if I was reading, my mom saw them at some point. Queer discourse kind of restarted in a lot of places with internet activism and The Invisible B-word was something we had to re-work through but people knew about bisexuality in the 90s. People read the Kinsey reports and made fun of Paula Rust and joked about how everyone was bisexual in the 70s. They joked about bisexuality on ROSEANNE for crying out loud. And my experience was my mom thinking I was going to catch bisexuality off someone. People saw being gay as the way you were born. People saw bisexuality as something you caught (you had a moment of weakness and slept with a gay guy and now you're stuck being bisexual). And that sounds more like what Eddie's experience of sexuality would be. His mom thinking it's something he's going to catch off someone. That part in Walking Tours when Mrs. Kaspbrak says "Any two men who bother keeping a house so nice must be queers,” it says she says it in "a disgruntled sort of way," not a significant or threatening one. She doesn't seem to think Eddie's growing up different, queer sexuality is a distant threat for now. I could see her worrying about it as Eddie gets older, like I said, as something Eddie would catch.
  3. Moving on to direct examples: Myra. Now, there are gay men who marry women. But in Eddie's case, Eddie is set up to be a parallel to Beverly Marsh. Beverly is attracted to and thinks that she loves Tom when she first meets him, but because of her abusive relationship with her father, is unable to leave the relationship when it becomes abusive. In Eddie Kaspbrak Takes His Medicine, Eddie's internal monologue states "he loved her, and there had really been no chance for him at all." The fact that it's an unhealthy relationship inspired by his childhood trauma doesn't take away from the fact that he does think of himself as in love with her. My gay friends who have been in relationships with girls they weren't actually into described their experiences with stuff like "It seems normal for guys not to be into their girlfriends very much" or "It felt like what I was supposed to do and the relief felt nice," not so much "I really thought we were in love." He also has to make an effort to force himself go out the door because it would be "too easy to let Myra take him upstairs and make love to him with aspirins and an alcohol-rub. And put him to bed, where they might or might not make a franker sort of love." We also see in The Reunion that Eddie and Myra are trying for a baby, often enough that they even go see a doctor to see why she isn't pregnant yet. Look, this isn't me writing an Eddie/Myra ship manifesto, because it's clearly an unhealthy relationship. But it stands out to me that in the movie where Eddie's gay, they had to do away with Myra completely.
  4. Another example: Greta Bowie. Eddie used to go out of his way to walk past her house. It reads differently than a crush for the benefit of social acceptance or his friends' approval. No one's around when he does this. In Walking Tours, it says "Once he had seen Greta herself, a lemonade in one hand and her croquet mallet in the other, looking slim and pretty ... even her sunburned shoulders seemed wonderfully pretty ... he fell in love with her a little that day—her shining blonde hair falling to the shoulders of her culotte dress, which was a cool blue." Shoulders are such an unusual and specific thing for a pre-pubescent kid to fixate on for no reason, so it just doesn't feel like performing heterosexuality to me.
  5. Eddie's fear of diseases and particular fears of syphilis and AIDS. There is so much community overlap between the horrible stereotypes and accusations gay men face about AIDS and those that bi men face. One group or the other doesn't own the experience. But bisexual men were under so much fire in the 80s and early 90s because people saw them as the villains bringing it over from the gay community to their safe straight sexual bubble. It would have been just a few years before the beginning of the first It movie that bisexual men were included in AIDS statistics. 1984, just looked it up. The bisexual activist David Lourea campaigned for two years for the department of public health to include bisexual men as a separate category from gay men in official AIDS reports. It's sad, but I think that particular line of bigotry suits Eddie Kaspbrak's character and fears very closely. He's afraid that he'll be toxic like his mother and that the love he has for his friends is toxic, which is what being bisexual felt like to me when I was still figuring it out and as a closet case. You feel selfish, you feel like your love might poison them because you're sick and you're going to spread it to everyone. That also makes sense as to why he would wait to act on his attraction to Richie, not just because he's afraid of the homophobic backlash, but because he's afraid it isn't real love if he also feels attraction to girls and all the attraction he feels toward anyone is tainted with the wildspread association with STDs.
  6. The fact that the form of Eddie's sexuality fear, the leper, is someone diseased who's asking for money for sex (the "I'll blow you for a quarter, I'll do it for a dime" part of The Dam in the Barrens) rather than just someone flirting with him or calling attention to his attraction to men. Men of all sexualities were sex workers, and it also was highly associated with gay men, but it was SO much more a bisexual stereotype. Holy shit it was a huge HUGE stereotype.
  7. Something that was just stereotypical then but is actually backed up by research now is the fact that bisexual men are more likely than gay men to suffer from drug addiction. Whether you think Eddie actually does have a drug abuse problem in the book or not, the part in the movie with all the sharps in the pharmacy made me think of that right away.

These are just a few examples, but I think it makes a case for people who read him that way. I don't think it means he can't be gay, but I think it means there's room for more than one interpretation.

**Author's Note:**

> Now it's time to keep it real. I am frustrated with seeing my friends get bullied on tumblr and twitter for posting about Eddie being bi. It is not okay to post biphobic comments on fics until people take them down because you think it's supporting gay people. Eddie Kaspbrak's not a real man. The people on the other end of your "Eddie would be disgusted you think he likes pussy" and "untagged bi Eddie makes me sick" comments ARE real people. And it's crazy how much of that comes from people who are neither a gay nor bi man. You don't know more about what it's like to be a man who's attracted to men just because you wrote fic about it or read a book and interpreted it one way. Fictionalized versions of that experience are never going to trump real experience. People who think they get to be assholes because they're experts are already bad, but there's really something about it when it isn't even experts. 
> 
> So comments on this meta are moderated because of all that, and if you try to get this taken down by reporting it as a non-fic I'm going to save you the time by letting you know "Fannish nonfiction, which includes what is called 'meta' by some fans, is allowed" is listed in the Terms of Service FAQ


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